Friday, November 14, 2008

Friday, October 17, 2008

Automaton is a VST / AU for stuttering and altering your music inside your DAW of choice. It's $49, and you can check out some examples of how it works on the Audio Damage website, or watch videos of it in action, such as these two from youtube:

via KVR, Sony Acid 7 is coming soon. The new features don't exactly scream "must upgrade" (apart from it working with Vista) but the beauty of Acid has always been it's lack of more features than you could ever need so you can get on with making music.You can compare version 6 and 7 here.

Friday, October 10, 2008

If you use Steam, you can download AudioSurf which is a racing game that uses the music you listen to create the race track you drive on. It costs $9.99, but there is a demo. There is more information about it on their website, also IGN review it here, they give it 8.6/10.

I've mentioned them before but DSK have heaps of really great VST's. They even make specialist VSTi's, like this one for Asian instruments, and this one for Indian instruments.There's another called Darkness Theory that sounds good, it's for making ambient music. But they've got everything from guitars and drums to a heap of different synths. They are all free too so well worth checking out.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Tanager Audio Works have a nifty little product called Chirp (above) which lets you run a Virtual MIDI keyboard in any program, which would be handy for use in Reason. It's $39.99 but there are free alternatives too...

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Ugo have a few free VSTs (there's also some you can buy), but I really like the sound of String Theory (top pic) and Texture (bottom pic). There's some audio demos on the site so you can hear what's possible.

Last year Wired reported on how NASA had recorded 'sounds' of space. You can download them here. There is also more of an explanation here.Stephen P. McGreevy also records sounds from the weather, you can get some of his stuff here.Space Sounds have recordings from Space and Space Travel.The University of Iowa also have a Space Audio section, while at Space.com there is a report of a black whole emitting a b-flat.

The Avant Garde Project is restoring old recordings of early electronic music, most of which are long out of print. Their collection includes compositions by some pretty famous composers ... or at least composers that you've read about in history books, even if you've never heard them. Reading down the list of composers, I see John Cage, Milton Babbitt, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Paul Hindemith and many others.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

One Tonne Music has some amazing info and pictures from the Korg DS-10, while Create Digital Music has some more info about it and how Nintendo wants to kill the flash loaders that homebrew gamers use, but is also used to pirate official products (like the DS-10).

You may have read recently of how old recordings of Delia Derbyshire have been found, and how one track sounds very much like something that could have come out last week. You can read the article and hear samples here (it's also worth reading the comments in this post for more info). Delia created the Doctor Who theme while working in the BBC Workshop, which was set up by Daphne Oram, and there is an article about her, her work and some samples of her work here.

In the latest CM Special you get 100 freeware tools for making music (though word is only four work on Macs), including TAL-BassLine, a Roland emulator. It comes in VST and AU for Windows and OS X and is well worth the download.

Audio Paint is a Windows only program which lets you create music from pictures. This would be great if you were looking for inspirartion, you could then just cut it all up and resample it in your DAW.

I haven't used this yet so I will quote from the website:"Numerology is a modular sequencing and audio plugin environment for Mac OS X. It takes sequencing and modulation metaphors established by the analog sequencers of the 70's, and implements them in a structured and highly interactive software environment designed for experimentation, improvisation and live performance. By using Numerology in conjunction with your choice of Audio Unit plugins and hardware synths, you can create an open compositional environment that is truly your own"

Thursday, June 26, 2008

The Chemical Brothers second album, Dig Your Own Hole was even better than the first, though they stand together pretty well. After this they slowly moved in to more commercial territory until finally selling out with the release of their Singles collection, everything else since then has been pretty poor.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

I considered buying this, but I don't find using a QWERTY keyboard that hard really. I would have to get used to it I guess. What I like most about most would have to be the pads, which are supposed to be amazing.